In today’s day and age, the performance and speed of your website are crucial in determining its success. Your users expect quick results and will abandon your website if they do not get them.
In case the loading speed of your website is slow, you will experience a high bounce rate as your customers will move on to faster websites. It also has a direct impact on the search results rankings. Hence, to keep your website ranking high and deliver a great user experience, the speed of your website is crucial.
There are several things you can do to boost your website’s speed. These include simple to apply but highly effective aspects of website optimization. Take a look.
Why is it important to boost your website’s speed on shared hosting?
The main element that sets shared hosting apart from the rest is its resources that are divided among all of its users on the same server. It also has limited resources to offer including space, CPU, and RAM. These prove to be enough for startups or smaller businesses that require limited resources.
However, if you encounter huge amounts of traffic, it might take its toll and reduce your performance. The problem will be worsened if other users on your server also need a lot of resources as there might be none left for you. This could have a direct impact on the speed of your website.
How to boost the speed of your shared hosting website?
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Plugins and themes
There are certain plugins that are necessary to enhance the functioning of your website and add to the user experience. When you add so many that they start to weigh your website down, it becomes a problem. You need to sift through them and choose carefully, or you could be creating vulnerabilities that might threaten the security of your website. You also have to put in extra effort to maintain it.
There are several plugins that boost the aesthetic appeal of your website by increasing the number of style sheets along with JavaScript files. These have a detrimental effect on your speed as it creates additional HTTP requests. Precise code is vital so that they do not load where you do not need them. So, assess the plugins you don’t need and remove them.
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Employ a content delivery network
The closer the server is to your users, the faster it will load. However, if you aim to move it nearer to one group of visitors, you will invariably be moving it away from the others. For example, if you migrate your server to the US, your visitors in New Zealand will experience a dip in their loading time.
The perfect solution for this is a content delivery network that places your data worldwide. This enables the server nearest to the visitor to send over the content of your website that is requested. Hence, your website loads at lightning-fast speed when your visitors want to access it from any corner of the world.
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Enable GZIP Compression
GZIP is a way to decrease the size of various files that form the entirety of your website. So it is basically a way to compress the file. It can be extremely helpful as it can decrease your web page load by a maximum of 70%. The loading speed is directly proportional to the size of the page. Several website hosting services have GZIP compressions as part of their plans themselves.
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Enforce caching
Caching is basically the process of decreasing the loading time of web pages by storing static files when they are first requested by the user and sharing them immediately henceforth. In the majority of instances, the main aspect to focus on is Server-side caching. You will have to skim your documents and figure out the perfect settings that can aid you in caching your server.
The main thing to remember is that if something needs a lot of processing from the server, it needs to be cached. If you cannot figure this out, you can always opt for plugins that can do the job for you, however, they might also slow down your website’s speed too.
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Image optimisation to boost speed
One of the biggest culprits of a website suffering from slow loading times is images. Pictures that are uploaded in high resolution are quite heavy and take a lot of time to upload, thus making your website slower. If you have a 1000 pixel picture, but reduce it to 150 pixels, the image that is downloaded remains large while being shrunk according to the confines of the code.
You should also measure the size of the image yourself before putting it on your website to decrease the time it takes for various devices to download it. Just put together a 150-pixel image if that is what you need on your website. You should aim to confine your images to a PNG or JPEG format. It’s better to optimize the images that you upload.
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Put lazy loading to use
One of the alternative ways of image optimization includes lazy loading as it helps image loading so that you can be sure that the elements which have to be displayed first are loaded in the beginning. So the ones that are not in use will not load automatically until needed.
If it is not required to be displayed, it will not be asked to load. In case your website puts plenty of media files to use, this can be extremely beneficial. A webpage that has a lot of heavy images can take a toll on the speed and make it extremely slow.
Conclusion
It is crucial to figure out the reasons your website has slowed down and find a way to remedy it. Website performance is vital in growing it since it plays a huge part in delivering a great user experience and adheres to the norms set out by search engines. Hence, the steps mentioned above are the perfect easy-to-implement way to improve the speed of your website.
